Thursday, May 16

Today, we received a lecture on the Mekong River Delta of Ho Chi Minh. The Mekong is one of the two largest delta regions in Vietnam; the other major delta is the Red River delta in the North, located in Hanoi. We also had an hourly language class. We learned some basic conversational phrases and practiced with the microphones with our partners. The Vietnamese language has been extremely difficult to learn because there are many forms of each word. In the afternoon, we visited Glass Egg Digital Media. The company first began as an insourcing for the firm, Morgan Interactive, however started as an independent firm when the company became bankrupt in 1998. They formally then established as Glass Egg Digital Media Incorporated in 1999. Glass Egg Media is located on two levels, in a building in downtown Vietnam. Glass Egg is an outsourcing firm that creates digital media to incorporate in many modern video games such as Forza. Their specialty is in designing cars for video game companies. Some of their most successful projects have been incorporated in games such as Need for Speed and Forza. Everything is modern and built with the newest technology. Working in an industry where technology is constantly changing, it is essential to the company's success that they "stay ahead of the game" and invest in all the industries new technologies. For dinner, we ate at a resteraunt adjacent to the BenTonh Market, Pho 2000. It was a very traditional Vietnamese meal, however then chicken was like eating rubber. We walked back to the hotel from the resteraunt, and crossed paths with 3 huge rats on our trip. I am from New York City, where it is not unusual to see rats in the streets of the city. However, I have never been in a city like Ho Chi Minh that is so filled with rats and cockroaches. Talking to one of the professors of our culture classes, he told us a funny story about rats while the French were colonizing in Vietnam. The French would pay the Vietnamese citizens for rat tails, proving they were helping to kill off the rats in the city. The Vietnamese began creating rat farms, however, so they would actually be creating more of a rat problem and they would make money still off the French for the rat tails of their rats in their farms.